Somewhere in this alternate universe, Billy Beane is furiously plotting the sequel to his best-selling autobiography:
Dr. Strangeglove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bunt. The
A's scuffled to sixty-seven wins and a third consecutive last-place finish in 2006, and in a page straight out of the
Chuck LaMar Guide to Winning Baseball, made a huge splash in the market by signing 37 year old
Bret Boone to displace .290 hitting second sacker
Miguel Cairo.
To be fair, this wasn't exactly an offseason full of bargains (trust me on that one!
), but after losing Mark Kotsay to
Tampa and "The Organ" to the beloved
Pale Hose,
Oaktown needed an outfielder. Instead, they got
Boone, who still can drive the ball, but the
A's have plenty of guys that can do that.
Nick Swisher, slated to start in left, is not necessarily one of them.
Bob Kielty and
Bill McMillon won't join
Eric Chavez as answers to the trivia question "What
Athletics won an MVP from 2000-2025?", either, but I guess it's pointless to hem and maw over what could be or should be. It's not pointless to sit back and laugh at
Jeremy Brown, starting catcher and owner of a career .282 OBP and .275 SLG, so...take your Moneyball and stick it, statheadzz!
Oakland has an even bigger problem aside from their one-dimensional offense, though, and that's the pitching, which somehow managed to give up more runs than even the
Pale Hose in '06. Roughly half of those were handed out by
Joe Blanton, who elicited me to wonder how OOTP's development engine accounts
for disaster seasons. And, boy, what a disaster it was:
Code:
G IP H BB K HR W-L ERA
35 140.1 190 54 86 18 4-18 7.76
Consider that the league average was nearly four full runs lower, at 3.90. Might that be the worst pitching season ever? I'll do some research and get back to you, maybe. But
Blanton pretty much single-handedly negated the 62 innings of a run average just above two from
Arthur Rhodes, who saved twenty-five, and the fine work from his set-up man
Jim "Quasimodo"
Mecir, who pitched 93 frames and allowed 3.39 runs per nine.
But whatever fans this club had left were still praying for rain even when
Blanton wasn't on the mound, because the rest of the rotation wasn't much better.
Mark Mulder posted a second consecutive season of league-average pitching, and that might just be his performance level in this universe. Think B. Beane took note? I like
Mulder's ERA to drop perhaps as much as a run from last year's 4.39, but it still won't mean much. The four guys behind him, none of whom are named 'Blanton' (he's mercifully in AAA), would all be on the fringes of any other rotation, even the
Pale Hose. All have a proclivity to give out lots of home runs, and all have many letters in their last names, so I won't even mention them. Same goes for the bullpen, aside from
Rhodes and
Mecir, it's a cast of no-names and misfits, and not even misfits that can occasionally pitch well like
Quasimodo. Youngsters like 25 year old
Bradley Sullivan can't come up from AAA fast enough, but even he is not a savior like one young man named
Scarborough.
So who is the savior in
Oakland? Well, last year's 13th overall pick was a high school catcher (!), likely from Louisiana, with the wonderful name of Robert Thibodeaux. The kid hit .212 with 11 home runs in 259 at-bats at single-A. My scout opines that he'll be a star if "he'll get his head on straight." I wonder if the management in
Oakland will ever do the same.